Jane Arden’s debut feature film The Other Side of the Underneath (1973) is an adaptation of the radical feminist play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches (1971). In both the play and the later film, the all-female cast re-enact personal and archetypal situations using autobiographical material, which was collectively gathered from group therapy sessions led by the director. Psychedelic drugs were also consumed during the group therapy sessions. In this article, I will situate Arden’s distinct approach to performance in the film within the framework of psychodrama, focusing specifically on the role that psychedelic drugs play in unleashing performers’ repressed feelings of trauma, rage, and desire; these emotions are harnessed into a dynamic mode of performance that amplifies the cathartic possibilities of women’s speech. The film’s heady brew of radical feminist politics, group therapy, and countercultural self-actualisation is both challenging and contentious. I argue that Arden’s pursuit of consciousness liberation through psychodrama and psychedelics—in other words, through ‘raising’ and ‘expanding’ consciousness—is best understood as a concerted attempt to align countercultural and radical feminist tactics for unravelling repressive forms of social conditioning.
At the outset of one of the more celebrated American novels of the second half of the 20 th century, the main character and storyteller declares:[t]he fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carabine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.Many film scholars are certainly familiar with Binx Bolling, the alienated protagonist of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. 1 Binx has problems holding onto reality, feeling attached to it, and accordingly producing a memory of past experiences; he prefers the movies, and this preference is the symptom of an estrangement. In the novel, media experienceno matter how joyful and richequals a problematic stance in the world, though this happened a long time ago. Cinema was meeting one of its cyclical crisesoccasionally, Binx visits half-empty movie theatresand movies were still believed to address and maintain some kind of relationship with a referential reality. However, what seemed back then a contradictory attitude to the world and humankind is nowadays a widespread, constitutive, pivotal mode of individual and social existence. Cinema caters to an overall mediated memory while its boundaries and existence grow less certain. Film scholars may rejoice to discover that their students do remember some film scenes from the past. Contemporary cinema's uncertain identity is the starting point of The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) by Francesco Casetti. By telling two anecdotes, Casetti introduces the reader to basic but paramount questions, echoing André Bazin's pivotal query: what, when, and where is cinema today? Or, in a more encompassing way: how is
Over the last two decades a resurgence of interest in the cinematic has marked certain areas of the contemporary art world in what has come to be known as its 'cinematic turn'. 1 Art institutions continue to reflect a growing interest in the moving image in its many forms, whether through the presence of moving image installations or through the programming of artists' film within both the 'black box' setting of the cinema and the contemporary gallery. 2 The proliferation of moving images has become an almost ubiquitous feature of the modern exhibition-going experience, giving rise to a number of discourses concerning the nature and role of film curation and cinematic spectatorship, including an ontological concern with the medium of film. Framed against a series of debates that focused on the role of the curator within this climate, the inaugural Artists' Film Biennial was held over four days in early July 2014 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. 3 Though the ICA has a long tradition of programming festivals of experimental and independent film this was the first showcase of the biennial in its current incarnation. 4 The event drew clearly on its exhibition lineage, particularly in extending the structural framework of the last biennial held there, 2012's LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images. Both spanned four days and combined theatricallypresented single screen works alongside numerous opportunities for discussion. Crucially, both events also upheld a curator-centred model, revealing the continuing dominance of the curator's role within the landscape of contemporary art. 5 This review will focus on the structural framework of the biennial before going on to examine the curatorial direction behind several of its programmes.The Artists' Film Biennial positions itself as a celebration of 'artists' film and moving image, a wide-ranging (and yet still the favoured) term for surveys such as this one. As Erika Balsom has noted, the term artist's cinema is impossible to reduce to a single proposition and rather encompasses 'single-channel works alongside multiscreen projection, film as well as video, looped exhibition and scheduled screening times, an interest in the virtuality of a represented world or in the phenomenology of spectatorship, an espousal or a rejection of narrative, and works made expressly for a gallery context and those made for traditional cinematic exhibition but now transported into the white cube'. 6 Works screened at the Artists' Film Biennial reveal a slightly narrower interpretation of the term than the previous description allows, and were mostly limited to single screen film and video works both projected and discussed within the 'black box' of the ICA cinema.
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